Adobe seeks to extend reach of Flash, nukes licensing fees

Adobe has announced the Open Screen project, which will eliminate the …

Adobe has announced a new initiative called Open Screen, which aims to make the company's Flash multimedia technology ubiquitous on mobile and embedded devices. Adobe plans to eliminate the licensing fees required to distribute its own Flash player and AIR runtime implementations on mobile devices and will also remove licensing restrictions on the specifications for the FLV and SWF formats so that developers can create fully-compatible independent Flash player implementations.

The initiative is supported by a diverse selection of companies in industries ranging from telecommunications to content production, including ARM, Samsung, Nokia, Intel, Cisco, the BBC, and MTV. Adobe hopes to work with these companies to make Flash and AIR the de facto standards for creating and delivering rich media content across computing, entertainment, and communications devices. Eliminating the licensing costs for deploying and integrating Flash playback capabilities in embedded devices will likely appeal to phone handset makers and set-top box manufacturers. Adobe will also be publishing open specifications for its Flash Cast protocol, which will allow third-parties to create custom Flash streaming solutions.

Although the Flash multimedia technology stack was once extremely proprietary and engineered for maximum vendor lock-in, Adobe has gradually been opening various pieces and attempting to build open standards around them in order to encourage the growth of compatible third-party solutions. Adobe released the source code of the Flash player ActionScript virtual machine under an open source license in 2006 and is collaborating with Mozilla to build a standards-based ECMAScript 4 implementation with it that will eventually be used in the Firefox web browser. Last year, Adobe also opened the source of its Flex SDK and its rich web application remoting framework.

Although Adobe will not be opening the source code of its own Flash implementation, the company's new Open Screen plans indicate that complete specifications will be available without the traditional restrictions. The specifications were previously only accessible to developers who were willing to sign agreements saying that they would not use the information to implement a Flash player. That licensing model forced open-source Flash implementors to resort to reverse engineering, which doesn't guarantee full compatibility. Adobe's decision to eliminate those licensing restrictions will make it possible for developers working on open source flash projects like Swfdec and Gnash to use Adobe's official specifications.

The Open Screen project will give a big boost to third-party Flash technology and could eventually lead to a significantly better Flash experience on poorly-supported platforms like Linux, where Adobe's official Flash player is obscenely crappy. It also creates the possibility for third parties to bring Flash technology to platforms that were completely unsupported before—most notably, 64-bit operating systems, which have long been neglected by Adobe.

Adobe has been moving slowly in this direction for a few years now, but it's likely that the threat of competition from Microsoft's Silverlight technology was also a relevant factor that contributed to Adobe's decision to open up the Flash formats. Silverlight is largely documented, uses an XML-based format that is supported by open-source authoring tools like Inkscape, and is supported by a mostly-compatible open-source implementation that is under development. Flash could also see some pressure on the distant horizon from emerging standards-based solutions like the HTML5 video tag, which is beingimplemented in several browsers.

The Open Screen initiative is a win for the open web and the Flash ecosystem. This will empower third-party developers and bring a wider range of choices to content distributors as well as to end users, and it seems likely that the growing amount of competition in the rich web content space will continue to push advancements toward openness that benefit everyone.